EBay Now Equipped With Frickin’ RedLasers

EBay CEO John Donahoe says that a few years from now we’ll be making more purchases with our cellphones than from our wallets. And the company’s sales do seem to bear that out. At our D8 conference, Donahoe said eBay’s (EBAY) iPhone app was responsible for $600 million in sales last year. So the company’s acquisition today of RedLaser makes good sense.

The mobile barcode-scanning application has proven a big hit with savvy shoppers who use it for on-the-spot comparative pricing information, snapping photos of barcodes, which the application uses to discover additional information about the product as well as prices from other merchants. Now that eBay owns it, a lot of that information will be pulled from its own listings and retail partners.

When it debuted on Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store, RedLaser was priced at $2. But beginning today, eBay is offering it for free, and soon it will integrate RedLaser’s barcode scanning tech into its current iPhone applications.

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